I've said this before, but it's about time or a redesign of the wiki.

I'm working on the new wiki engine to get everything put together properly, however I haven't had any real inspiration for a new design.

So this is an open call for any of you artistic types out there who would like to help out the community.

You can send any designs to me via pm or email If I get multiple designs I will put up a poll and let the community decide. If I don't get any I guess we'll be stuck with whatever an analytical geek like me can come up with.

I would love to have really unique design, but if you do decide to submit one remember the main purpose of the wiki is to disseminate information so keep this in mind. A beautiful site is no good to anyone if it's not functional.

Well thanks for taking the time to read. I'll let you know the progress.

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Xsecrets

Which engine will you be moving to? The main Mythwiki site uses MediaWiki and is so much easier to use than the current KMwiki engine that I've almost given up on the KMwiki site.

I'd be happy with the default look if the wiki worked better.

By the way thank you very much for setting up the kmwiki. It was a great help when I was setting up my KM machine.

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Paul Turpie
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<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

I will be using pmwiki. I looked at mediawiki, and I know it's the largest one out there, but pmwiki is a bit simpler to maintain and has some design elements that I really like. The biggest one being how easy it is to theme so that your wiki doesn't have to look like every other wiki on the web.

If I may ask what are the issues you have with the current wiki, so that I can attempt to address them in the new one.

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Xsecrets

I've not posted anything in a long time because your captcha doesn't work, at least not on my system with IE7. The image shows as a broken image, IE7 reports an invalid pointer error on line 504.

Another issue:
What the heck are these things?
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=WinZip
Did somebody spam this, or is it supposed to be a post of some kind?

I'd also advocate that the utility updater script by ChrisJ, have a home on the wiki, documenting all that it does and what the various options are for. For example, what is "dvgrab", and who needs it?
It's a great script, and it deserves a home.

It may be nice to have comment posting on articles, so that you can add "look out for this", etc., without editing the original. Sometimes editing is warranted, sometimes not.

I just set up pmwiki on one of my websites and it was very easy to set up. The instructions that came with it are spot on. I like how easy was as well to choose skins as well.

1. The history of a page is harder find and understand. With the Mythtv wiki I have a bookmark to http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Sp ... entchanges to see which pages have been changed. Then it is easy to click on the diff link to see exactly what has been changed without rereading the whole page. You can sort of do the same thing with the current wiki but it isn't as easy.

2. With the Mythtv wiki you can choose to just edit one section of a page without the clutter of the entire page. It may be that the articles in the current wiki just haven't been formatted for this but I've never noticed any that allowed it.

3. The current kmwiki page editor doesn't provide much help to the user, whereas the mediawiki and pmwikis both give you shortcut buttons and other hints as to how to format stuff.

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Paul Turpie
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<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

yes unfortunately the captua is broken in ie in the current engine, but unfortunately it was a necessity as the wiki was getting hit with wiki spam heavily. The new site will have a login, so I'm hoping to forgo a captcha if it becomes necessary I'm sure the pmwiki captcha's work on all browsers.



yes that appears to be some left over spam.



I have no problem with a script being hosted on the wiki. I do allow uploads and will continue to on the new wiki. they are capped at about 100k to prevent abuse, but if there is a good reason I can make an exception.



pmwiki does have this as a plugin, and I've considered it I'm not sure how I feel about comments on a wiki. what if people don't look down to the bottom of the page they miss some important information where they would have seen it had it been inserted at the appropriate spot in the page. I see the merits of both ways and I'm not sure how I feel. I would welcome more community discussion on this issue.



I'll have to look into that pmwiki has a very flexible pagelist function I'm sure I could create a list similar to that.



this too is offered as a plugin for pmwiki. I had concidered it, but I wasn't sure if any of the pages were long enough to merit it, however there are some long pages like the install docs, so it might be a good idea. The pages would have to be changed to include sections so that you could edit them seperately.



yes as you mentioned pmwiki does have buttons to assist with basic markup and I will have all the buttons active, however I do not plan on using a full wysiwyg editor as that is pretty much overkill for a wiki. (not to mention it's not well integrated with pmwiki at this time because the developers have the same feelings I just expressed.)

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Xsecrets

I dont know if the pmwiki Diff page can be configured to show more context, but it would be nice if it could show a paragraph or two above and below a change to make it easier to understand what is being changed.

For example see this recent change to the MythTV Feature Wishlist page.

This seems easier to understand than pmwiki's more concise history/diff pages.

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Paul Turpie
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<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

I looked into this and pmwiki currently does not support diff's like mediawiki the reason is that pmwiki shows the diff in output not the diff in page source.

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Xsecrets

Xsecrets, when I go to http://wiki.knoppmyth.net I get a different page than when I go to http://knoppmythwiki.org but they are (now) both at the same IP address. Is that not configuration, or what?

yeah I moved to a new host a while back. I'll have to look and see what I need to do to get it to respond to that hostname.

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Xsecrets

Xsecrets, as R6 will be substantially different from R5, will it be possible to separate the two issues on the wiki?

yes that should not be a problem. pmwiki has two different types of separations it has categories, and it has groups. I'm thinking that R6 will be a new group and possibly an archive group for old pages that are only relevant to R4. I'm not completely sure about the organization just yet. It might be a good idea to create separate groups for each version R4 R5 R6 of course there is no problem linking between groups, and they could all share categories.

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Xsecrets

Sounds good to me Xsecrets.